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With some questionable health advice being posted by your friends on Facebook, politicians arguing about the state of the American healthcare system and a new medical study being summarized in just a sentence or two on TV---that seems to contradict the study you heard summarized yesterday---it can be overwhelming to navigate the ever-changing landscape of health news.

To Your Health: Self Care

Madison Inouye

Author Brianna Weist recently wrote, “True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.”

Self-care CAN be salt baths and chocolate cake, but it is not just the now oft-touted reason for indulging yourself. True self-care involves some components that are not necessarily hedonistic.

Healing Ways: An Integrative Health Sourcebook reminds readers that despite all the latest and greatest fads, “many long-term studies by respected groups around the world, including the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and the American Heart Association, have shown that certain core behaviors are associated with longer, healthier living”:

Avoiding or quitting tobacco use.
Getting regular exercise.
Eating a healthy diet.
Limiting alcohol.
Maintaining a normal body mass index
Always wearing your seat belt
Taking advantage of available preventive care
and Following the recommended immunization schedule for your age group

But what about treating yourself? A recent study published in the journal Emotion found that both being kind to others and being kind to yourself increased happiness. While doing moral deeds and thinking moral thoughts help people feel more purposeful in life, taking time for being kind to yourself, like the aforementioned salt bath and chocolate cake, may prevent the exhaustion that sometimes results from focusing only on the needs of others.

Resources:
https://thoughtcatalog.com/brianna-wiest/2017/11/this-is-what-self-care-really-means-because-its-not-all-salt-baths-and-chocolate-cake/

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/to_be_happier_should_you_focus_on_yourself_or_others

Self Care and prevention. (2016). In M. Parente, Healing ways: an integrative health sourcebook. Hauppauge, NY: Barron's Educational Series.

Waytz, A., & Hofmann, W. (2019). Nudging the better angels of our nature: A field experiment on morality and well-being. Emotion.

Dr. Brooke Hildebrand Clubbs is an assistant professor in the Department of Leadership, Middle & Secondary Education. She writes for special publications of The Southeast Missourian and is a certified Community Health Worker.
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